Poll: Your child is born without a brain. Would you raise it regardless?
- Thread starter lucky_sharm
- Start date
A kid with no brain?
I don't see how, lacking a physical brain, it could actually count as a kid, it'd be a hunk of respiring tissue.
It wouldn't be possible to raise it at all, only to keep the heart beating.
I don't see how, lacking a physical brain, it could actually count as a kid, it'd be a hunk of respiring tissue.
It wouldn't be possible to raise it at all, only to keep the heart beating.
Shit. I don't know. I guess if the kid is going to die soon anyway, I would have the doctors take care of him. But I would still feel like shit either way.
Hell no. What kind of sick bastard does that, this isn`t like keeping a person in a coma on life support. People in coma`s have a sliver of hope. But when you are born without a brain there is absolutely no hope in all of the nine hells of them coming back. If you can't accept that your baby is not technically even alive you have some serious mental issues. It's not that the baby would even be aware that you're helping it, there isn't even techincally a baby, just an empty shell of something that could have been a baby. There is absolutely nothing human, that's just an empty shell. To me that's the equivialant of just carrying around a corpse and acting like its still alive.
Quite frankly, that definition of love seems kind of twisted to me. I mean if i dragged around the dead corpse of a baby and acted like i loved it would you tell me to give it some dignity and bury it, or would you just go on your buisness?redmoretrout said:
Without trying to sound like an ass, I'd probably raise it against my own will. I wouldn't be able to kill the kid.
I wasn't aware it was possible to live without a brain. Because it's how you function.Daystar Clarion said:
I would not keep the child. It would be painful, but I would put have the child put out of its misery. There's no way that child will get anywhere in life. Without a brain, how could it do anything? The child is already worse off than a literal couch potato. As much as it would hurt to have the child put out of its misery, it would hurt more to watch someone suffer like that.
There is a way. Ultrasound will generally pick it up. Also, 55% of babies with anencephaly are stillborn anyway, with most of the remainder dying a few hours after birth.Fudj said:
Too many brainless people running around as it is. Excluding even that theres too many people on this planet. There are actually people who think this should have been allowed
Yes its wonderful what we can do with medical science, but some things simply should not be. Prodding and injecting what is essentially little more than a growing sack of meat is inhumane and someone should have stepped in long ago and put this thing down before the insane person started perpetuating the abuse on something that cannot even experience or know of the pain it is being put through.
Allowing it to live is not just cruel... it is sick. Honestly, someone needs to be brought up on charges for this as it is as close as you get to a crime against humanity.
Yes its wonderful what we can do with medical science, but some things simply should not be. Prodding and injecting what is essentially little more than a growing sack of meat is inhumane and someone should have stepped in long ago and put this thing down before the insane person started perpetuating the abuse on something that cannot even experience or know of the pain it is being put through.
Allowing it to live is not just cruel... it is sick. Honestly, someone needs to be brought up on charges for this as it is as close as you get to a crime against humanity.
I'm... not sure how it's possible to raise a child like that. Like, how would it live without a brain?
Maybe it makes me a bad person, but I think that a child like this would be nothing but a burden on everyone, with no hope of ever contributing anything. Without a brain, it lacks everything that makes us human. It would have no ability to create, work, imagine, communicate, or form complex thoughts. I wouldn't raise it.
Maybe it makes me a bad person, but I think that a child like this would be nothing but a burden on everyone, with no hope of ever contributing anything. Without a brain, it lacks everything that makes us human. It would have no ability to create, work, imagine, communicate, or form complex thoughts. I wouldn't raise it.
That's a really difficult decision... the part of me that's got all those squishy emotions compels me to say that I would keep him/her.
But honestly, life without a majority of the things that make life worth living is no way to live...
Assuming the child had already been born or is beyond the point of legal abortion/the woman I'm having the child with refuses to go through an abortion, I would probably keep him/her and try to raise them to the best of my ability.
But honestly, life without a majority of the things that make life worth living is no way to live...
Assuming the child had already been born or is beyond the point of legal abortion/the woman I'm having the child with refuses to go through an abortion, I would probably keep him/her and try to raise them to the best of my ability.
A life is a life and even so that is not really much of a life that is just keeping meat fresh. Even if it did last more than 3 years what is it going to be? A body that just about maintains itself that needs constant care, A burden
If you got the bare basics but nothing to learn and take things in then all it is is an empty husk. Be it a empty husk that can move around a bit, probably make a bit of a mess probably along with some basic sounds.
Or at least that is what the thinking part of me is saying. The other part of me just does not want to think about it. And even then I am sure the final say would not be my own.
If you got the bare basics but nothing to learn and take things in then all it is is an empty husk. Be it a empty husk that can move around a bit, probably make a bit of a mess probably along with some basic sounds.
Or at least that is what the thinking part of me is saying. The other part of me just does not want to think about it. And even then I am sure the final say would not be my own.
Well, I'm slightly more depressed now than before I found this thread. Thanks a lot, OP.
It's rather underestimated how much of the human mind is actually in the nervous system going throughout the entire body, including the spinal cord, so I suppose I shouldn't be all that surprised that apparently this "miracle baby" was able to exhibit some facial expressions and minor reactions to that which occurred around him. In this way, I believe he suited the definition of "alive," perhaps even had a soul, if you can believe an amoeba does.
That said, I'd probably have had him euthanized, and his family must have been massively religious or something not to have done so. Never has, "The lights were on upstairs, but there was no one home" been such an accurate statement: I imagine he was just a big old sack of human flesh going through the motions of living but with the intellectual capacity of a mollusk. Literally, go back to the first mollusks to develop a backbone, put it in human form, this kid is what it would look like: yeah, it might smile from time to time, but you're still looking at a mollusk. I kept my dog alive when it was old just so it could enjoy a few more moments of existence, but we routinely feed things to pet store boa constrictors with more capacity to experience life than this. How the heck would anything good come of perpetuating that?
This whole scenario says a lot less about being a child and a lot more about the social psychology behind raising children. If this wasn't done out of a religious obligation, it was probably being done to placate the parents' incredible nurturing instincts or being done because they had a lot of people in their lives who simply would not accept euthanizing the baby. It sure wasn't being done for the baby's sake, not unless they were holding out for someone to perform a brain transplant, which I don't believe we're currently capable of doing in medical science. I can't even begin to fathom how they came to grips with having that creature in the other room for over 1000 days, but I imagine a lot of it came with telling themselves it was a child and not a mollusk... they probably considered it a living memorial of a stillborn child, really, and the care they showed was a demonstration about how they'd treat a kid to everyone: their relations, the media, God. Truth is stranger than fiction.
It's rather underestimated how much of the human mind is actually in the nervous system going throughout the entire body, including the spinal cord, so I suppose I shouldn't be all that surprised that apparently this "miracle baby" was able to exhibit some facial expressions and minor reactions to that which occurred around him. In this way, I believe he suited the definition of "alive," perhaps even had a soul, if you can believe an amoeba does.
That said, I'd probably have had him euthanized, and his family must have been massively religious or something not to have done so. Never has, "The lights were on upstairs, but there was no one home" been such an accurate statement: I imagine he was just a big old sack of human flesh going through the motions of living but with the intellectual capacity of a mollusk. Literally, go back to the first mollusks to develop a backbone, put it in human form, this kid is what it would look like: yeah, it might smile from time to time, but you're still looking at a mollusk. I kept my dog alive when it was old just so it could enjoy a few more moments of existence, but we routinely feed things to pet store boa constrictors with more capacity to experience life than this. How the heck would anything good come of perpetuating that?
This whole scenario says a lot less about being a child and a lot more about the social psychology behind raising children. If this wasn't done out of a religious obligation, it was probably being done to placate the parents' incredible nurturing instincts or being done because they had a lot of people in their lives who simply would not accept euthanizing the baby. It sure wasn't being done for the baby's sake, not unless they were holding out for someone to perform a brain transplant, which I don't believe we're currently capable of doing in medical science. I can't even begin to fathom how they came to grips with having that creature in the other room for over 1000 days, but I imagine a lot of it came with telling themselves it was a child and not a mollusk... they probably considered it a living memorial of a stillborn child, really, and the care they showed was a demonstration about how they'd treat a kid to everyone: their relations, the media, God. Truth is stranger than fiction.
